6 ms·

Is the face recognition done on the device, or on Facebook's servers? It's one thing to give the app permission to access your photos, it's another entirely to

by alex_c 11y ago

Is the face recognition done on the device, or on Facebook's servers? It's one thing to give the app permission to access your photos, it's another entirely to have it upload every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.

giancarlostoro 11y ago
I don't work for Facebook or anything, but based on my own judgement I believe they upload the pictures on to their servers to then analyze with their super computing power, which our phones are not capable of yet, without of course analyzing all their existing data within our phones, which I doubt they would give an end user (probably too large of a data set). I've uninstalled the Facebook Apps since a while back, they request for permission to do really strange and intrusive things such as reading all of my SMS text messages, no thanks.
- plaguuuuuu 11y ago
  So basically, as soon as you take a photo, even if you don't intend on ever uploading it, it gets sent to Facebook?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Well that's disturbing (but not surprising) if true (if you haven't opted in).
  - dreamdu5t 11y ago
    Most important question in this thread.
  - gcr 11y ago
    The parent was speculating! Please be careful. This is how rumors get started!
- gcr 11y ago
  In the verification setting, here's how recognition (could perhaps!) work: - Find the face in the image. This can easily run on a telephone no sweat. Viola and Jones practically solved this problem in 2001. - Find the parts of the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and then warp the face so it looks like it's facing right at the camera. A recent paper at CVPR last year was called "Face alignment at 3000 FPS," so this is also no sweat at all anymore. - Extract the face's features. This turns the pixels into a smaller vector representation (maybe a list of 1024 numbers perhaps). This is a bit tricky --- many current systems use convolutional neural networks to do this step, which typically take a lot of compute time. Maybe Facebook could shrink them down to a telephone. - Compare that feature vector to your friends' vectors. In the verification setting, you know the "feature vectors" of your 500 friends, so you find the Euclidean distance between the image's vector and the 500 others. No sweat. - To get a recognition result, just pick the closest vector. Or, if the closest friend is too far away, return "No Match". There are many ways to build a good face recognizer. This is one of them. This might or might not be what Facebook's doing. Last year, they published a paper called "DeepFace" which works essentially this way but with some extra tricks. (The paper is here, but the focus was on comparing to academic state-of-the-art on a strictly academic dataset. It's totally marketing / PhD recruiting bait. :P I'm sure their internal system they have now must be far better. https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/deepface-closing-the-gap-to-human-level-performance-in-face-verification/ https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/d... ) The AI and ML people at Facebook are darn smart. I would be impressed (but probably not surprised) if the wizards found some clever way to shrink the pipeline to fit on a phone without too much accuracy loss. So it's possible. I have no clue though.
- superuser2 11y ago
  Many Facebook users are in the third world / financial situations where data is very expensive and presumably engineers are designing for this. I cannot imagine they're stupid enough to run up these people's bandwidth bills with every single photo they take. Privacy concerns may be ignored, but "the latest Facebook update cost me $500 in data and I make $400/year" will not.

by alex_c 11y ago

giancarlostoro 11y ago

I don't work for Facebook or anything, but based on my own judgement I believe they upload the pictures on to their servers to then analyze with their super computing power, which our phones are not capable of yet, without of course analyzing all their existing data within our phones, which I doubt they would give an end user (probably too large of a data set). I've uninstalled the Facebook Apps since a while back, they request for permission to do really strange and intrusive things such as reading all of my SMS text messages, no thanks.

plaguuuuuu 11y ago
So basically, as soon as you take a photo, even if you don't intend on ever uploading it, it gets sent to Facebook?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Well that's disturbing (but not surprising) if true (if you haven't opted in).
- dreamdu5t 11y ago
  Most important question in this thread.
- gcr 11y ago
  The parent was speculating! Please be careful. This is how rumors get started!
gcr 11y ago
In the verification setting, here's how recognition (could perhaps!) work: - Find the face in the image. This can easily run on a telephone no sweat. Viola and Jones practically solved this problem in 2001. - Find the parts of the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and then warp the face so it looks like it's facing right at the camera. A recent paper at CVPR last year was called "Face alignment at 3000 FPS," so this is also no sweat at all anymore. - Extract the face's features. This turns the pixels into a smaller vector representation (maybe a list of 1024 numbers perhaps). This is a bit tricky --- many current systems use convolutional neural networks to do this step, which typically take a lot of compute time. Maybe Facebook could shrink them down to a telephone. - Compare that feature vector to your friends' vectors. In the verification setting, you know the "feature vectors" of your 500 friends, so you find the Euclidean distance between the image's vector and the 500 others. No sweat. - To get a recognition result, just pick the closest vector. Or, if the closest friend is too far away, return "No Match". There are many ways to build a good face recognizer. This is one of them. This might or might not be what Facebook's doing. Last year, they published a paper called "DeepFace" which works essentially this way but with some extra tricks. (The paper is here, but the focus was on comparing to academic state-of-the-art on a strictly academic dataset. It's totally marketing / PhD recruiting bait. :P I'm sure their internal system they have now must be far better. https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/deepface-closing-the-gap-to-human-level-performance-in-face-verification/ https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/d... ) The AI and ML people at Facebook are darn smart. I would be impressed (but probably not surprised) if the wizards found some clever way to shrink the pipeline to fit on a phone without too much accuracy loss. So it's possible. I have no clue though.
superuser2 11y ago
Many Facebook users are in the third world / financial situations where data is very expensive and presumably engineers are designing for this. I cannot imagine they're stupid enough to run up these people's bandwidth bills with every single photo they take. Privacy concerns may be ignored, but "the latest Facebook update cost me $500 in data and I make $400/year" will not.